WILLIAM R. HEARST has sought to turn aside something at least
of the public indignation against him by the plea that those who charge him
with responsibility in the crime of Czolgosz are business rivals who are trying
to benefit themselves by injuring him. In his organ, the Examiner of this city,
he directed that plea on Sunday in a special measure against The Call, and will
doubtless repeat it in the hope that by iteration and reiteration a considerable
number of the people may be induced to believe it. It is therefore incumbent
upon The Call to take note of it.
Hearst could hardly have conceived a more false
but at the same time a more cunning plea. The public cares little or nothing
about controversies between rival newspapers, and Hearst is aware that if he
can so shift this issue as to make it appear nothing more than a question between
The Call and the Examiner, he will be able to sneak out of the storm and escape
the punishment which public condemnation has prepared for him.
Let it then be noted that the charge of Hearst’s
responsibility for anarchy and for crime has not been made solely by The Call.
On the contrary, it was the spontaneous outburst of public sentiment in all
parts of the country. The intelligence of the American people had noted the
tendency of the teachings of the Hearst journals and had long since condemned
them. In that condemnation, however, there was a contemptuous disbelief that
the vicious teachings by pen and picture could result in an actual attempt upon
the life of the President who was daily vilified and maligned. The crime of
Czolgosz startled the public by a disclosure that the Hearst papers were not
so harmless as public contempt had supposed them, and at once there arose the
cry of the public—“Down with the anarchists, and down with the yellow journals.”
That cry came from all classes of citizens. In
many parts of the country Hearst was hanged in effigy as an evidence of the
popular rage against him, and while the masses were expressing themselves in
that or other equally forcible ways eminent men were pronouncing the condemnation
of Hearst in the most emphatic manner and under the most solemn and impressive
circumstances.
Among those whose charges Hearst has to answer,
and whom he cannot set aside by the shuffling lie that they are business rivals,
are: Grover Cleveland, Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop Riordan, Bishop Cranston
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, President Wheeler of the University of California,
President Jordan of Stanford, Vice President Cooper of Rutgers, Abram Hewitt
of New York, and almost every orator who spoke at memorial services held at
every important city in the Union on the day of the funeral of the President.
To these are to be added the host of other men who acted as the representatives
of public institutions and organized bodies, such as the Chamber of Commerce
in this city and the State Board of Horticulture.
These men were not vague in their condemnation.
Some of them, indeed, did not name Hearst nor the yellow journals which he supports
out of his wealth, but they made their meaning so clear and plain that no one
could mistake it. Others frankly spoke the loathed names and specified that
they meant William R. Hearst and his three papers, the New York Journal, the
Chicago American and the San Francisco Examiner.
Does Hearst deem it possible that he can induce
the American people, or even a respectable minority of them, to believe that
such men are his business rivals, or in any way jealous of his “superiority”?
He has threatened to retaliate upon those who
condemn him. How will he retaliate? Will he burn in effigy all who have burned
him in effigy? Will he slander every man in America who has refused to take
one of his papers? Will he hold up the eminent men who have spoken against him
and daily vilify them for the purpose of rousing against them some wretch of
the Czolgosz type?
Should Hearst, learning discretion from cowardice,
hold fast to his scheme of misrepresenting the issue to the public and insist
that after all it is but a newspaper fight, he will even then have his hands
full when he undertakes the task of retaliation. It is not in California only
that he has been exposed and the meaning of his vicious teachings made clear
by the press. He and his journals have been condemned in the East almost as
universally as in California. In the whole of this State he has had but one
or two apologists, and in proportion to the number of papers he is about as
badly off in the East.
It would require more space than we can afford
to publish the list of all Eastern newspapers that have expressed the popular
condemnation of the yellow journals. Taking only the more important papers and
those only that have emphasized the criminal character of the Hearst publications
by repeatedly directing popular attention to it, we have this long array:

From that list, including as it does almost every
eminent legitimate journal in the East, it will be seen that in trying to sneak
out of public wrath by setting up a newspaper fight the yellow anarchist has
hardly benefited himself. There is no other man in America, or probably in the
world, who is regarded by the members of his own profession with so much of
abhorrence as is this man who has sought to degrade American journalism to the
slums and bring the profession of Franklin, Greeley, Bryant, Prentice and Dana
down to the level of Czolgosz.